Anti-Trafficking and Its Discontents: Women’s Migrations and Work in an Indian Borderland

Abstract

India’s eastern border areas with Bangladesh has been the target of concerted anti-trafficking interventions for decades now, to stop human trafficking from Bangladesh into India transiting through these areas, and also of girls and women from these areas to other parts of the country. This article presents an ethnographic examination of such an anti-trafficking campaign in tandem with migrant women’s responses to and negotiations of these influential interventions, as they live out its consequences in their migration experiences and upon return to their rural homes. In other words, this article asks, what is the social life of locally articulated anti-trafficking discourses? I argue that in this border area, women’s work in general, and their migrations for work in particular, are framed by a prescriptive sexual morality that is structured by the prevalent gendered hierarchies of mobility and labour. By centring borderland women’s narratives of migrant work and its consequences, this article shows that migration not only sustains the family economy but also becomes the principal arena in which women stake claims to their active roles in economic and social transformations of their material and spatial realities. I bring literature on borders and borderlands to bear on the challenges faced by migrant women in a South Asian borderland as they encounter multiple forms of social control, which include a combination of anti-trafficking and anti-migration discourses. The article shows that migrant women contest the victimization paradigm of the trafficking discourse, and that representations and embodied practices become central to establishing reputation within social networks across spaces in such contestations.